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Tag: San Francisco

  • Dentsu Ventures invests in US ‘cloud-first’ smartphone development startup

    Dentsu Ventures invests in US ‘cloud-first’ smartphone development startup

    MUMBAI: Dentsu Ventures Global Fund I has made an investment in San Francisco based Nexbit Systems Inc, a startup developing cloud-integrated services for smart devices from both the hardware and software perspectives.

     

    Nextbit is the third company in which Dentsu Ventures has invested since its launch in April 2015.

     

    The company was established with the objectives of investing in ambitious start-up companies that will create an as yet unseen future and furthering open innovation across the Dentsu Group through collaboration with investees. In addition to funding, Dentsu Ventures will support businesses and entrepreneurs by providing problem-solving solutions and resources that are unique to the Group.

     

    On 1 September, Nextbit launched Robin, a “cloud-first” smartphone that enables synchronized cloud storage of music, videos, apps, photos and other high-volume data without any user action required. The crowdfunding campaign for the Robin smartphone was launched the same day, and the US$500,000 goal was reached within a matter of hours. Nextbit is pushing mobile computing forward with the introduction of innovative software and hardware that solves important user problems such as running out of local storage space on smart devices.

     

    As smart devices continue to diversify, Dentsu Ventures believes that real-time data integration and linking across devices together with the development and provision of unprecedented user experiences that optimise this capability will become increasingly important. Nextbit’s innovative technology will offer smart device users an entirely new type of cloud service in this Internet of Things era.

     

    Looking ahead, the Dentsu Group will provide support for the spread of the Robin smartphone worldwide as well as the other new businesses that Nextbit will develop in the future.

  • John Legend to speak at Marketo’s 2015 Marketing Nation Summit

    John Legend to speak at Marketo’s 2015 Marketing Nation Summit

    MUMBAI: Musician and producer John Legend will be a special guest speaker at the 2015 Marketing Natio Summit, which is being held from 13 – 15 April at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The summit is being organised by Marketo, a provider of engagement marketing software and solutions.

     

    Legend joins speakers like Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington and education reform crusader Salman Khan.

     

    Legend is a singer, songwriter, producer and philanthropist, who has won nine Grammy awards and the 2015 Academy Award for Best Original Song for the motion picture Selma. Legend will deliver a special guest keynote at the Marketing Nation Summit’s Day One agenda on 14 April.

     

    Each year, the Marketing Nation Summit brings together over 6,000 of the brightest minds in marketing, offering a variety of sessions that discuss the next era of marketing, engagement marketing strategies, best practices and workshops for every level.

     

  • Debra O’Connel to preside over ABC National Sales

    Debra O’Connel to preside over ABC National Sales

    MUMBAI: American Broadcasting Company (ABC) executive Debra O’Connell has been promoted to president of ABC National Television Sales, it was announced today by Rebecca Campbell, president of the ABC Owned Television Stations Group. She succeeds John Watkins, who previously announced that he will retire at the end of January.

     

    ABC National Television Sales is the sales and marketing arm of the ABC Owned Television Stations Group. Ms. O’Connell will be responsible for national advertising sales at ABC’s eight owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, Raleigh-Durham and Fresno as well as their extensive digital platforms, The Live Well Network and ABC Regional Sports & Entertainment Sales. ABC National Television Sales has nine regional sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit and Boston.

     

    Ms. OConnell has been with ABC for 17 years. She was previously senior vice president of sales for ABC National Television Sales, a position to which she was named in 2011. Prior to that, she served as senior vice president of Multimedia Sales and Marketing for the division from 2006-2011. She was also vice president of Marketing at WABC-TV in New York, where she first joined the ABC Television division in 1999 after working at ABC Radio in Sales and Marketing.

     

    She began her career as an account executive for two of Liberty Broadcasting’s radio stations, and marketing director for DiCarlo Distributors.

     

    Ms. O’Connell serves as chairman of the Television Bureau of Advertising Sales Advisory Committee, as well as being an Executive Board Member, where she works with senior media & advertising executives to develop policy and new trends in the local broadcasting industry. She is also a member of Nielsen’s Local Alliance Committee. Ms. O’Connell is a mentor in The Walt Disney Company mentor program and is deeply involved in the ABC NTVS internship program.

  • American SC upholds ban of political ads on public radio and television

    American SC upholds ban of political ads on public radio and television

    NEW DELHI : While lawyers dismantle many restrictions on political money, the rules affecting Morning Edition and Downton Abbey still stand tall. A federal court in San Francisco says public radio and TV stations cannot carry paid political ads.

    The 8-3 decision Monday by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling last April by a smaller panel of the court. NPR and PBS both joined the case as friends of the court.

    The court upheld the decades-old bar against political ads on public broadcasting stations, even as other restrictions have vanished over the years. One long-gone rule held that funders could only be listed by name.

     

     
  • American SC upholds ban of political ads on public radio and television

    American SC upholds ban of political ads on public radio and television

    NEW DELHI : While lawyers dismantle many restrictions on political money, the rules affecting Morning Edition and Downton Abbey still stand tall. A federal court in San Francisco says public radio and TV stations cannot carry paid political ads.

     

    The 8-3 decision Monday by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling last April by a smaller panel of the court. NPR and PBS both joined the case as friends of the court.

     

    The court upheld the decades-old bar against political ads on public broadcasting stations, even as other restrictions have vanished over the years. One long-gone rule held that funders could only be listed by name.

     

    The case just decided – Minority Television Project vs. FCC – began as a bid to take any commercial advertising. Among the arguments rejected by the appeals court, the TV station invoked the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling of 2010, which allowed corporations to spend freely advocating for or against candidates..

     

    Two dissenting judges argued that the station did not get a fair shake because “judges like public radio and television, while pretty much nobody likes commercials.”

  • Pinterest unveils ads, strikes international mobile deal

    Pinterest unveils ads, strikes international mobile deal

    MUMBAI: After announcing its intention to do so last month, the fast-growing social network unveiled its new ‘Promoted Pin’ advertisements recently. The pins are marked by a subtle label below the item description. In a blog post, Pinterest CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann said ‘Promoted Pins’ are still in a testing phase and “nobody’s paying for anything yet – we want to see how things go and, more than anything, hear what you think.”

     

    San Francisco-based Pinterest promises the ads will be tasteful, transparent and relevant: “No flashy banners or pop-up ads,” Silbermann said in the blog post. The ads will appear in both Pinterest’s online and mobile apps, and are being rolled out now to a small portion of users for feedback.

     

    Don’t expect the ads to remain unpaid for long. Once fine-tuned, Pinterest is expected to open the floodgates for its first revenue-generating product. With an estimated 53 million users and a value of $2.5 billion, ads should significantly cushion four-year-old Pinterest’s coffers.

     

    In a separate development, Pinterest announced Thursday a deal to place a special widget on Android phones sold through Spanish mobile giant Telefonica. Pinterest already has an Android app, but the prominently placed widget will update faster and allow non-users to search it for shopping, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

     

    No money is involved in the deal, but Pinterest is hopeful it can add international users, as well as bolster its mobile footprint. Telefonica has about 316 million customers in Europe and Latin America.

  • Fox Sports Digital acquires assets of social startup fanhood

    Fox Sports Digital acquires assets of social startup fanhood

    MUMBAI: Fox Sports Digital has acquired the assets and intellectual property of social sports start-up Fanhood naming the founder & CEO Brandon Ramsey as Fox Sports Digital vice president of platform engineering.

    The purpose cited for the acquisition was to hire Ramsey and his core team of engineers and give the relaunch of FoxSports.com. Ramsey will take a newly created position at the company.

    “FoxSports Digital continues to invest in building a world-class technology leadership team, and the Fanhood acquisition deepens our product development expertise,” Fox Sports Digital senior VP Pete Vlastelica added in a statement. “We are excited about combining the Fox Sports Digital and Fanhood teams to amplify our efforts to help users discover and share sports content in new and unique ways.”

    Ramsey will run the company’s personalisation and social product development, joining with the personnel at Fox Sports-owned Yardbarker to create a platform technology center for Fox Sports Digital in the Bay Area. He and his team, based in San Francisco, will report to newly hired FSD senior VP of platform development Ben Gerst, recently brought over from the New York Times.

    “We believe in developing applications that make following sports with your friends easier and more fun,” Ramsey said. “We look forward to applying our expertise to FOX Sports Digital’s vision of creating a personalized, socially integrated content platform.”

    Members of Fanhood’s leadership team previously worked at Yahoo, Zynga & Slide; Ramsey was head engineer at Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Deals, and Yahoo Travel.

  • U2opia Mobile Pioneers USSD Gateway on Cloud with Tigo Group

    U2opia Mobile Pioneers USSD Gateway on Cloud with Tigo Group

    New Delhi, August 6, 2013 – Singapore-based mobile technology start-up, U2opia Mobile, has pioneered the next wave in value added services by extending their USSD platform and hosting a USSD gateway on cloud.

    USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is a session-based technology that enables access to social and content services on mobile without an Internet connection. Among its most popular implementations is Facebook for USSD, which allows users to access Facebook on mobile, without internet. Its other implementations include access to Twitter, Google Talk and a host of content services.

    With this innovation, the final barrier is removed for any telecom carrier to implement USSD services on its network, as it removes all dependency on the carrier’s own USSD gateway.

    By deploying the USSD gateway on cloud, implementing USSD services becomes a plug-and-play process for any operator, vastly reducing the time and resources required. It successfully removes all hardware dependency from the process, making its implementation, as easy as a single-day process.

    The first deployment of USSD gateway on cloud has been with the Tigo Group across El Salvador, Paraguay and Bolivia and the service has already racked up close to 70,000 users in the space of two weeks.

    Commenting on the innovation, Sumesh Menon, CEO, U2opia Mobile, said, ‘While services powered through Fonetwish were a runaway success in practically every country we entered, deploying services through the host carrier’s USSD gateway did present a layer of complexity. There would invariably be issues relating to hardware, bandwidth and so on, thereby increasing the time needed for implementation.

    By deploying the USSD gateway on cloud, that complexity is removed and the process is practically plug-and-play. It opens up a world of opportunity for every carrier globally, to provide value added services to their non-smartphone user base.’

    U2opia Mobile pioneered the implementation of social and content services through their USSD platform Fonetwish in 2010 and now have operations in 25 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, catering to millions of users in 6 global languages across 40 telecom carriers.

    The mobile technology start-up creates applications catering across the handset spectrum – from basic/feature phones to smartphones. With financial backing from Matrix Partners, they have offices across Singapore, India, Dubai and San Francisco.

  • Myntra acquires online fashion boutique Fitiquette

    Myntra acquires online fashion boutique Fitiquette

    MUMBAI: E-commerce portal Myntra has acquired San Francisco-based Fitiquette, a technology solutions company that aims at solving size and fit issues for online shoppers.

    Through this acquisition, Myntra aims to strengthen and expand its technology platform and drive transformational change in the online shopping space in India by providing world-class experience to its customers.

    Without revealing financial terms of the deal, Myntra said that the acquisition was part cash, part stock.

    This is Myntra‘s second acquisition in a short span of four months. It had acquired Sher Singh, a global private label online brand specialising in sports-inspired lifestyle apparel for men and women and its New York based parent company Exclusively.in in November last year.

    Myntra CEO and co-founder Mukesh Bansal said, “Myntra aims to create the most compelling Fashion Shopping experience for Indian consumers at par or better than global standards. Fitiquette has developed pioneering technology for solving the Fit/Size problem online. This acquisition will not only help us improve the experience significantly, but will also enhance our technology team with addition of top tech talent from Fitiquette.”

    The Fitiquette team will be joining Myntra with Andy heading Myntra‘s newly formed Innovation Labs in San Francisco.

    Fitiquette CEO and co-founder Andy Pandharikar said, “The Indian e-commerce industry is growing at breakneck speed and it is a great time to be a part of this journey. I am confident that Fitiquette‘s powerful technology will benefit Myntra‘s vision of providing world class solutions to online shoppers across the country.

  • Woody Allen’s latest has Cate Blanchet, Alec Baldwin

    Woody Allen’s latest has Cate Blanchet, Alec Baldwin

    MUMBAI: Veteran film director Woody Allen has signed Blanchett, comedian Louis C.K. and actor Alec Baldwin for his next yet-to-be-titled project.

    Allen has said that the film would be shot this summer in New York and San Francisco. Incidentally, the Oscar-winning director will use San Francisco as his backdrop for the first time since Take The Money And Run, his directorial debut in 1969.

    The new project will also see the 76-year-old filmmaker return to American soil after having filmed his last three projects in London, Paris and Rome.
     
    Although, details of the plot have not be given, the film‘s cast abounds of comedic and dramatic talent like British actress Sally Hawkins, Lost actor Michael Emerson and Green Lantern star Peter Sarsgaard.

    Allen has helmed more than 40 films over a career spanning six decades.

    His latest film To Rome With Love that stars him alongside Penelope Cruz and Jesse Eisenberg will hit US screens on 22 June.